LTI - Learning Tools Interoperability now available

We have some very good news to report today, well at least if simplicity is important to you, or lowering the workload for your ITS staff, or lowering your operating costs, or future proofing your long term IT planning? VoiceThread is now officially LTI conformant. Available to every institutional VoiceThread partner, LTI represents not only the future of standards-based interoperability, but also the core values of VoiceThread itself: increasing accessibility, simplifying the user experience, and making technology disappear into the background.

What is Learning Tools Interoperability? The short answer is that it’s a common technical standard created by IMS Global, whose mission is to ‘Advance Learning Impact by Enabling the Open Foundation for Seamless, Agile and Information-Rich Educational Technology Integration.’ Yes, that’s a mouthful, but now let’s see what that concept means when applied to real-world stakeholders:

• For Students – VoiceThread, and multi-sensory communication, becomes a seamless part of the LMS and of their teaching and learning interaction with professors and peers.

• For Faculty – On day one of a course, and for each day afterward, the roster is created automatically so that as students sign in, they are given accounts and appropriate access to the course content.

• ITS support staff – Professional development and training is significantly reduced in scope as faculty and students are given fewer technical management tasks that need to be documented, taught, and supported. In addition, LTI setup is standards based and remarkably easy to implement.

• CIO and Organization Leaders – Because the LTI standard is a broadly supported across all the major LMS providers, using it to integrate with VoiceThread makes any future LMS roadmap changes extremely safe. The ability to lower IT costs is predicated on choice, and tools that integrate via LTI can be migrated with ease from platform to platform.

Lastly, VoiceThread itself is a stakeholder in all this. Our core area of expertise has always been making multi-sensory communication simple to use and highly accessible for people all over the world. LTI allows us to pursue our central mission instead of getting bogged down building and supporting complex plug-ins for the various LMS platforms. When we are allowed to focus on our strengths, we build low-cost, enterprise tools that make everyday people communicate more effectively and, importantly, smile. LTI allows us to do this, and we’d like to thank all the people at the IMS Global Learning Consortium for recognizing the need for open learning-technology standards and then doing all the hard work to make them happen, kudos.